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Toleration is possible only to men of large infor= 
mation.— SCHILLER. 



What was the Relig- 
ion of Shakespeare? 



A Lecture Delivered Before the Inde- 
pendent Religious Society, Orchestra 
Hall, Michigan Avenue and 
Adams St., Chicago, Illinois, 
Sunday, at 1 I A. M. 




By 
M. M. MANGASARIAN 



D\^ 



.^3 



■ 4> 

Who am I ? — A mortal seek= 
ing knowledge I 



Gift 

AiJS ft tmm' 



Ulbat was ibe Religion of 
$bal(e$l)carc? 



It is by observing- the frequency and emphasis with which 
certain views and expressions occur and reoccur in an author, 
and the consistency with which they are given the preference, 
that w^e may be able to generahze as to his philosophy or relig- 
ion. As Shakespeare's works are neither a treatise on the- 
ology nor a manual of philosophy, our only means of discover- 
ing his attitude toward the problems of life and destiny is 
by reading, as it were, between the lines. 

A great mind can neither sophisticate nor suppress its earn- 
est convictions. This does not mean that anyone with earnest 
convictions must necessarily be a propagandist. To think and 
to let think, represents a state of mind which is entirely con- 
sistent, both with enthusiasm and toleration, if not with pro- 
selytism. We believe that Shakespeare has unmistakably ex- 
pressed himself on the subject of religion, as he has on that 
of patriotism, for instance, but without any missionary zeal, 
which fact has led not a few students of his works to the con- 
clusion that of all the great poets Shakespeare is the only one 
without a religion. 

Green, in his Short History of England, writes, that 'Tt is 
difficult to say whether Shakespeare had any religious faith 
or no." But this is not a fair way of stating the problem. 
If by "religious faith" Green means the Anglican, the Presby- 
terian, or the Unitarian faith, then it is true that we do not 
know to which of these he nominally belonged, and it does not 
much matter. But if he means that we have no means of 
knowing whether or not he accepted the Christian or any other 

3 



supernatural interpretation of the Universe, the allegation is 
not true, so far as we are able to judge. It is difficult to read 
any one of Shakespeare's tragedies without perceiving that 
its author is an anti-supernaturalist. In Shakespeare this world 
is all there is, and it is what men have made it. It is in terms 
of naturalism, pure and simple, that Shakespeare states the 
problem of human existence. 

It is no objection to this to say that there are ghosts, witches, 
and apparitions on his stage, and that therefore he was a be- 
liever in the supernatural. We must not confound the machin- 
ery of the stage with the stage-master. Even Hamlet, when 
he exclaims that he sees his dead father and Horatio asks him 
"Where?" answers: "In my mind's eye;" which shows how 
little the appurtenances of the theatre of those times affected 
the atmosphere of the author's mind. This same Hamlet who 
in popular parlance' \\2.s beheld his dead father "revisit the 
gHmpses of the moon," declares in the language of his own 
sober thought, that the beyond is an "undiscovered country 
from whose bourne no traveler returns." And if Macbeth, 
unlike Hamlet, puts faith in the supernatural, he does so to 
his own hurt. But even Macbeth recovers his senses suffi- 
ciently to exclaim: 

And" be these juggling fiends no more believed, 
That palter with lis in a double sense ; 

and again: 

Infected be the air whereon they ride ; 
And damned all those that trust them! 

If it be objected that Shakespeare's hostility to the super- 
natural is confined to what might be called the bogus variety, 
and not to the kind that is true, we reply that there is no evi- 
dence in the plays that Shakespeare ever made such a dis- 
tinction. Without anywhere intimating that he believed in one 
kind of the supernatural and not in another (the kind people 
believe in is generally their own, and the kind they deny, that 

4 



of somebody else), Shakespeare expresses his opmion of those 
who accept the supernatural in no uncertain way: — 

Look how the world's poor people are amazed 
At apparitions, signs, and prodigies, 
Whereon with fearful eyes they long have gaz'd 
Infusing them with dreadful prophecies.* 

Having just told us that ''It is difficult to say whether Shake- 
speare had any religious faith or no," Green intimates that 
Shakespeare was an agnostic, and probably a disciple of Mon- 
taigne. If he was an agnostic, it is not true that we do not 
know "whether he had any religious faith or no." We can 
be sure that he was without religious faith of any kind, using 
the word "religious" in the sense of the supernatural — if he 
preferred agnosticism to the creeds. He was an agnostic, it 
is to be supposed, because he could not conscientiously pro- 
fess any of the "religious faiths" of his day. 

But to be an agnostic does not mean to be without a religion ; 
it only means to be without a revealed religion. This very 
agnosticism, as the expression of a courageous, honest and 
rational protest against revealed religions, is a religion — more 
manly, certainly, than the popular religions, because while the 
latter are imitative to a large extent, the former is uncon- 
strained and personal. 

Those who say unqualifiedly that Shakespeare had no relig- 
ion, as Prof. Santayana of Harvard University, does, must 
mean by religion a recognition of the supernatural, which we 
submit is to make a partisan use only of the word religion. 
Wishing to prove the absence of religion in Shakespeare, Prof. 
Santayana writes : "If we were asked to select one monument 
of human civilization that should survive to some future age, 
or be transported to another planet to bear witness to the 
inhabitants thereof what we have been upon earth, we should 
probably choose the works of Shakespeare. In them we recog- 
nize the truest portrait and best memorial of man." After 
this magnificent tribute to the universality of Shakespeare, 

*Venus and Adonis. 



Prof. Santayana proceeds to qualify his statement by deplor- 
ing what he calls "the absence of religion in Shakespeare." He 
fears that if Shakespeare were our sole interpreter, "the archae- 
ologists of that future age, or the cosmographers of that other 
part of the heavens, after conscientious study of our Shake- 
spearian autobiography, would misconceive our life in one im- 
portant respect. They would hardly understand that man had 
had a religion." This fear is unfounded. It may surely be 
learned from Shakespeare that "man had had" many supersti- 
tions, and also that there was in our world the worship of the 
Good, the True and the Beautiful. Such a report would not 
leave the inhabitants of a strange planet in the dark as to 
whether or not "man had had a religion." Let us make this 
point a little clearer: In Shakespeare we find both the relig- 
ion of superstition — addicted to the belief in ghosts, spirits, 
miracles, visions, and revelations past and present — and the 
religion of sense, namely, the elimination of the supernatural 
from human affairs, and the exalting of Goodness, Beauty, 
and Truth, with Truth as the greatest of the three, as the 
highest possible ideals of man. But, evidently. Prof. Santa- 
yana does not believe that it is possible to leave out the super- 
natural from religion and still have a religion. "But for 
Shakespeare, in the matter of religion," writes Santayana, 
"the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose 
nothing." In our opinion Shakespeare chose something which 
was more in accord with the concensus of the competent, 
though opposed to the prejudices of the populace, namely: the 
rationalist attitude in the presence of life and death. And 
why is not this attitude as much entitled to be called a phi- 
losophy and a religion as the theological? 

Would it not be unfair to say, for instance, that Tennyson's 
The Coming Church of Humanity is no church at all, because 
it is not after the fashion of orthodoxv : 



I dreamed that stone by stone I reared a sacred fane, 
A temple, neither pagod, mosque, nor church, 
But loftier, simpler, always open-doored 



To every breath from heaven ; and truth and peace 
And love and justice came and dwelt therein : 

— or to contend that Goethe was profane and irreligious be- 
cause the verse in which he sums up his philosophy omits all 
reference to the essentials of revealed religion? 

In the Entire, the Good, the Beautiful resolve to live — 
Wouldst fashion for thyself a seemly life. 
Then fret not over what is past and gone ; 
And spite of all thou may'st have lost behind, 
Yet act as if thy life were just begun. 

The religion of not a few of the best minds has been of 
the above type; and surely, to a reasonable man the Catholic 
who denies that the Protestant is a Christian, or the Trini- 
taria;n who excommunicates the Unitarian is not more secta- 
rian than the philosopher w^ho denies that Goethe, Tennyson, 
Voltaire, or Shakespeare, had any religion at all because they 
did not have his religion. 

The German critic, Gervinius, on the other hand, expresses 
the opinion that Shakespeare was silent on religion "because 
his platform was not a pulpit." But it was a very narrow 
view to take of religion, to intimate that outside the pulpit 
religion is an intruder. If religion is one's philosophy of life, 
it is at home everywhere, but if it is only one's beliefs con- 
cerning dogmas and rites, then the pulpit is its exclusive 
sphere. Shakespeare was silent on religion of the kind Ger- 
vinius has in mind, not because "his platform was not a pulpit," 
but because he had no such religion to express. A man's 
religion is his philosophy of life, in accordance with which he 
shapes his conduct and interprets human destiny, and surely 
Shakespeare was not without such a working-religion. 

The position of W. J. Birch, the English parliamentarian 
who writes from the Christian standpoint, appears to us more 
consistent. He believes that Shakespeare was not at all silent 
on religion, in the Christian or supernatural sense of the word, 
but demonstrably antagonistic to it. He then produces pas- 
sage after passage to show Shakespeare's positive disHke for 



such fundamental tenets of revealed religion, as the doctrines 
of providence, the Fall of Man, the Holy Sacrament, the Word 
of God, Salvation, the Church, the Priesthood, etc. Birch de- 
nounces Shakespeare because he was not a Christian ; because 
*'not only the details, but the essentials, also, of Christianity 
are the themes of his flippancy." He infers further, from the 
companions of Shakespeare — Marlowe, Green, Raleigh, Beau- 
mont and Fletcher; and from the books he read — Lucretius, 
Plutarch, Lucian, Montaigne and Bruno — that he could not 
have been a Christian, as no follower of Jesus Christ could 
take any interest in such profane writers. 

Replying to those who quote the Will of Shakespeare to 
prove his piety. Birch says that the Will is not in the poet's 
handwriting; that the signature, alone, was his, the rest being 
the customary form of legal documents drawn by lawyers for 
such occasions. The real sympathies of Shakespeare, Mr. 
Birch thinks, may be inferred from such lines as the follow- 
ing:— 

An idiot holds his bauble for a God. * 

and again : 

r.y that same God, zufuit God soc'cr it be, * 

— which seems to imply, according to this Christian critic of 
Shakespeare, that there are as many Gods as there are fancies. 
The reason which Mr. Birch assigns for the indifference of 
Shakespeare's contemporaries to his works and fame was his 
non-Christian teachings, which made him rather an object of 
distrust and fear than of admiration. The world of his day 
was religious, says Mr. Birch, and, therefore, it was glad 
enough to forget Shakespeare and remember the men who had 
left monuments of piety behind. The opposition of the reHg- 
ious element is thus given as one of the reasons for the 
absence of any recognition of his genius and the oblivion to 
which he seems to have been condemned before a less pious 



* Titus Andronicus. 



or puritanic age discovered with ecstasy the wealth and glory 
of his thousand souls. Milton's joyous exclamation echoes the 



gratitude of the intellectual world 



Thou, in our love and astonishment 
Hast found a life-long monument. 



But the majority of the apologists of supernaturalism, appre- 
ciating the value of Shakespeare as an ally, have stoutly 
claimed him as a Christian believer. Bishop Wordsworth has 
written a voluminous work to show how much of the Bible 
there is in Shakespeare. Mr. George Brandies, with much 
justice, calls this pious bishop's book ''unreadable." Another 
Christian interpreter of Shakespeare offers the folUowing apol- 
ogy for the poet's seeming indifference to the tenets of ortho- 
dox religion : "Doubts have been entertained as to Shake- 
speare's religious belief, because fezv or no notices of it occur 
in his works. This ought to be attributed to a tender and deli- 
cate reserve about holy things, rather than to inattention or 
neglect." 

The above shows how indispensable to the interests of 
Christian doctrine Shakespeare's approval of them had come 
to be regarded by the later Christians. His was too great and 
shining a name not to have it listed on their side, and so was 
invented ''a tender and delicate reserve" on the part of the 
poet, to explain his open protests against their creeds, which 
they mildly call his failure to take "notice" of them. 

Others, again, have written lengthy arguments to prove 
that the immortal poet was a devout Catholic, an orthodox 
Calvanist, a loyal AngHcan, and so forth. The man who in 
his lifetime was associated with Marlowe and his school, and 
who was vehemently denounced by the exponents of religion 
in that day — the Puritans — is today hailed by the descendants 
of these same Puritans as the honor and glory of their faith. 
But this change of heart is a purely sentimental one. It is, 
as already intimated, the increasing eclat of Shakespeare's 
name and fame which has made him desirable as a coreligion- 
ist. Already, even Thomas Paine is being claimed as a fellow- 

9 



believer. Air. Brooke Hereford writes that if he, the author 
of the Age of Reason, were Hving now% he would join the 
Unitarian Church. It is not, however, by consulting our own 
necessities that we find out the religion of another. We may 
all wish that Shakespeare believed just as we do, and that he 
was upon our side of the question, but could our wish be any 
evidence in a matter of this kind? 

The real attitude of Shakespeare toward revealed religfon 
will be learned by observing, as we stated above, the frequency 
and consistency with which certain expressions appear and re- 
appear in his works. An author's intimate beliefs may be 
ascertained by observing the prevailing mood of his mind, the 
atmosphere his characters breathe in, and the more or less 
permanent moulds into which his thoughts flow. 

'That is alone to be called a man's opinion," writes Shaftes- 
bury, "which is, of any other, the most habitual to him, and 
occurs upon most occasions." To the same effect are the 
words of Sir Bulwer Lytton, quoted by W. J. Birch in his 
Philosophy of Shakespeare: 'Tn the mind of man there is 
always a resemblance to his works. His heroes may not be 
like himself, but they are like certain qualities which belong 
to him. The sentiments he utters are his at the moment; if 
you find them predominate in all his works, they predominate 
in his mind." 

We may illustrate the truth of the above remark by an exam- 
ple from Moliere, the ''Shakespeare of France," as he has often 
been called. In a conversation between a beggar and a citizen, 
the beggar is asked what he considers the object of life. 

"To pray God for the good people who give me alms," 
he answers. 

"Ah, you pass your time in praying to God ! In that case 
you ought to be very much at your ease," says the philosopher 
citizen. 

"Alas ! sir," replies the beggar, "I often have not what to 
eat." 

"That can not be," protests the citizen, "God would not 
leave those to die of hunger who pray to him morning and 

10 



night. Come, here's a pound; but I give it you for the 
love of humanity." 

It is not possible for anyone who believed in orthodox 
Catholicism to express with such emphasis and lucidity a senti- 
ment like the above. Moliere could never have placed the 
praying mendicant in the light he does, nor invoked the name 
of humanity to a man who did all his begging in the name of 
the deity, had he been a consistent Catholic. Equally conclu- 
sive are the following Shakespearian lines in one of the his- 
torical plays, on the denominational sympathies of the great 
poet: King John instructs the Cardinal to bear this message 
to the Pope of Rome: — 

Tell him this tale; and from the mouth of England 

Add this much more,— that no Italian priest 

Shall tithe or toll in our dominions; 

So tell the Pope, all reverence set apart 

To him and his usurped authority. 

And when the believing King Philip protests against what 
he calls "blasphemy," King John returns in words which leave 
not a shadow of doubt as to Shakespeare's positive distrust 
of Catholicism : — 

Though you and all the Kings of Christendom 

Are led so grossly by this meddling priest, 

Dreading the curse that money may buy out ; 

And, by the merit of vile gold, dross, dust,' 

Purchase corrupted pardon of a man, 

Who in that sale sells pardon from himself; 

Though you and all the rest, so grossly led, 

This juggling witchcraft with revenue cherish; 

Yet I, alone, alone do me oppose 

Against the Pope, and count its friends my foes. 

In the same way Shakespeare's attitude toward the Puritans 
of his day is decisively shown in his frequent references to 
them, of which the following is a fair specimen: "Though 
honesty be no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt." 

Even more final than the above is Shakespeare's rejection 

11 



of the idea of providence, which is the nerve of supernatu- 
ralism. When Miranda, a young, innocent girl, observes from 
the shore a ship, with its freight of human Hves, sinking, 
lashed mercilessly by the blind and unfeeling elements, she 
exclaims : — 

Had I been any God of power, I would 
Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e'er 
It should the good ship so have swallowed, and 
The freighting souls within her. 

Only a little less decisive is Shakespeare's repudiation of 
all ''other-help," and his recommendation of self-help, which 
makes ninety-nine per cent of the belongings of the popular 
religions superfluous : 

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie 
Which we ascribe to Heaven. 

/\gain Shakespeare writes : — 

In religion, 
What damned error, but some sober brow 
Will bless it and approve it with a text. 

We can imagine how a man who, kept apart from the great 
theological interest of the day, could make the above com- 
ment ; but for a partisan of any one of the sects, such a char- 
acterization of the folly and wickedness of making a number 
of Bible texts the occasion for endless wrangles and bloodshed 
would have been impossible, for the very cogent reason that 
in condemning the practice of resorting to Scripture as the 
court of last appeal in all matters of religion, he would have 
undermined his own position. Such a passage as the above 
illustrates with what scant sympathy the leading mind of that 
age contemplated the warfare of rival faiths. And when it is 
remembered that what heated the religious sects, the one 
against the other, were subjects concerning which no one 
possessed any knowledge, we will appreciate Hamlet's amaze- 
ment that we should make such fools of ourselves : — 

So horridly to shake our disposition 

With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls. 

12 



A further condemnaticn of the claims of rehgious organiza- 
tions that they possess a Revelation which answers definitely 
and finally man's questions concerning the here and the here- 
after, and a recommendation of the scientific attitude of mod- 
esty and openness of mind to fresh knowledge, is found in the 
lines, so frequently quoted, but with little understanding of its 
import : — 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

Revelation may be closed, the Bibles and creeds may have 
no further use for study and investigation, but for a man of 
the rationality of Shakespeare, no revelation, no Bible, no 
creed, approached anywhere near covering the ever widening 
realm of truth. The books of the gods are sealed. Shake- 
speare believed in the open book. 

Shakespeare's belief in the religion of Humanity is also 
show^n by his sympathy with goodness irrespective of the race, 
creed, or country which produces it. He could admire a 
pagan for his virtues despite the teaching of the catechism 
which condemns the non-Christian world to the tortures of 
hell. Only a man of the sanity and chastened sympathies of 
Shakespeare could speak of a Roman skeptic in the following 
exalted tone : 

His life was gentle, and the elements 

So mixed in him, that nature might stand up, 

And say to all the world, "This was a man !" 

His approval also of the philosopher's behavior in the pres- 
ence of death, as distinguished from the believer's dogmatism, 
is shown in the parting scene between Cassius and his great 
friend, Brutus : 

For whether we shall meet again I know not. 
Therefore our everlasting farewell take. 
Forever and forever farewell, Cassius ! 
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile ; 
If not, why, then this parting was well made. 

13 



It has been suggested that the above does not show Shake- 
speare's own intellectual attitude toward the beyond, for he 
is only reporting the sentiments which such a character as 
Brutus entertained. In other words, it is one of Shakespeare's 
characters, not Shakespeare himself, who is philosophising. 
But it is curious that in Plutarch's history, from which our 
poet borrowed freely for this play, Brutus acknowledged a 
future state, and is positive of his future reward. ''I gave up 
my life for my country in the Ides of March, for the which 
I shall live in another more glorious world," Plutarch reports 
Brutus to have said. Shakespeare's changing this dogmatic 
assurance concerning a future life to the philosophic attitude 
of unconcern shows conclusively which w^ay his own sympa- 
thies inclined. 

To further clinch the point, that Shakespeare is here speak- 
ing his own thought and not merely inventing thoughts suit- 
able to his pagan characters, let us quote a stanza from his 
Sonnets which, it is admitted, embody the poet's own philos- 
ophy. It will be seen that he is thoroughly hnbued with the 
Lucretian, or the scientific thought, of mafi and nature : 

When I consider every thing that grows 
Holds in perfection but a little moment; 
That this huge state presenteth nought but show 
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment. 

And what is true of nature is true also of man, notwith- 
standing his self-exaltation : 

When I perceive that men as plants, mcrease, 
Cheered and checked even by selfsame sky, 
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, 
And wear their brave state out of memory , 

f 
Yet this transitoriness of man, instead of diminishing, en- 
hances his value, and makes love, friendship and truth all the 
more precious. Life would not have been so great a gift, if 
it were unending. Love, the greatest of all blessings, shines 
upon the dark brow of death ''like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's 

14 



ear." It is the thought of death, of separation, which creates 
attachments and friendships inexpressibly sweet. 

Then the conceit of this inconstant stay- 
Set you most rich in youth before my sight. 

Of course there are also many expressions in Shakespeare 
which a Catholic may cite to prove that Shakespeare was a 
faithful child of the church, or a Protestant to show that the 
greatest mind of England was on his side, but the context of 
Shakespeare, it must be admitted, is unreservedly on the side 
of the non-supernatural and the rationalistic interpretation of 
Hfe. 

When we come to examine the construction of Shake- 
speare's plays, we shall find that it is as decisively along ration- 
alistic lines as the atmosphere which permeates them. Gods 
and ghosts fleet across his stage, but they have no perceptible 
influence upon the order or drift of events in Shakespeare's 
world. The center round which Shakespeare makes the uni- 
verse revolve is — man! This represents a radical departure 
from theology. The change from the contemplation of God 
to the study of man is the Renaissance in a nut-shell. 

Shakespeare, as the great Renaissance poet, lifted this world 
into the importance which the next world had usurped, and 
urged men to reclaim the prerogatives which they had, in fear 
and servility, deeded away to their gods. 

Study, for instance, Romeo and Juliet, and it will be seen 
that the entire story, beginning with the rosy dawn in which 
love and youth met, to the noon-day storm which swept the 
unhappy lovers to their graves, is conceived, created and pre- 
sented without the remotest reference to a divine providence 
as a factor in human affairs. Everything happens in a natural 
way, and from natural causes. Romeo's rashness and Juliet's 
impatience leave room for no mysteries as to their fate. There 
may be, or there may not be, a God, but to explain this tragedy 
it is not necessary either to postulate or to deny his existence. 
Shakespeare steers clear of the occult powers that are sup- 
posed to preside over human destiny, and never once does he 

15 



cross their paths or enter the circle of their influence. Con- 
sider, for example, the conduct of his Romeo and Juliet in 
the presence of death. Much is made of the death bed scene 
in religious literature. People are supposed to turn their 
thoughts heavenward in that hour, and to show anxiety about 
their souls. It is then, we are told, that a sense of the world 
to come takes irresistible possession of the mind. The last 
words of the dying are recalled to show how, upon the brink 
of the grave, as the earthly sun is sinking, the heavenly 
lights begin to appear. But Shakespeare's Romeo and 
Juliet confront death without any thought of a future 
reunion, which is very remarkable considering their youth 
and their fondness for one another. It almost betrays 
a deliberate effort on the part of Shakespeare to pre- 
vent these ardent lovers, dying ere the budding rose of love 
had opened, to even dream of a life beyond where they may 
forever live and love. Nothing could be a clearer indication 
of Shakespeare's intellectual freedom from both the phrase- 
ology and method of theology. Romeo knows of no other 
paradise than his Juliet, while to the latter, where Romeo is, 
there is heaven. This is frank, honest, free, but it is not how 
the Mohammedan, the Christian or the Jewish religions expect 
the dying to express themselves. Romeo's address to death 
ignores all revealed religions : 

Come, unsavory guide ! 
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on 
The dashing rocks, thy seasick weary bark! 
Here's to my love 1 * * * Thus with a kiss I die. 

Surely this is not the language of the believer. Nor has 
Romeo any illusions about death : 

Oh here 
Will I set up my everlasting rest ; 
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 
From this world-wearied flesh. 

And to think that Romeo had a Catholic priest for a friend ! 
But it shows how clean Shakespeare's mind was from ''such 

16 



fantasies "^ "^ '•' more than cool reason ever comprehends." "^ 
And when Romeo takes his farewell of Juliet, his thought 
is equally free from fancies : 

Eyes, look your last ! 
Arms, take your last embrace ! and lips, O you. 
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss, 
A dateless bargain to engrossing death. 

Nothing could be more un-Catholic and un-Protestant than 
this parting of Shakespeare's best lovers. Juliet, who has 
often knelt before the priest, dies without one appeal to religion 
for comfort or support. She has no faith, now, in the hour 
of her greatest need, in prayer, crucifix, Bible or church. "Go, 
get thee hence," she cries to the friar when he approaches 
to minister to her in her crushing sorrow. She follows Romeo 
without uttering one word about God, or the future. In the 
same spirit, "The rest is silence," murmurs Hamlet as he sinks 
to the ground, and we may announce with considerable assur- 
ance that the words are Shakespeare's as much as they are 
Hamlet's, j 

But the naturalism of the poet as opposed to the supernatur- 
alism of the religion of his day is further brought out by the 
free and uninterrupted operation in his plays of the law of 
action and reaction, of cause and consequence. It is no angel 
of heaven, as we read of in Scripture, that exalts or strikes 
down the people in Shakespeare's world ; but by their own 
acts they rise or fall. Intemperance brings Timon of Athens 
to the dust ; folly ruins Othello ; insolence cuts Corialanus' 
career short ; ambition and superstition strangle Macbeth ; 
hypocrisy subjects Angello to the contempt of his fellows; 
hatred and revenge blight the life of Shylock. Heaven 
plays no part on Shakespeare's stage. Man reaps as he sows, 
and no gods are necessary to enforce cause and effect. If 
Nature's laws defy the power of man, do they bend or break 
when gods command? Pride, shame, intemperance, greed, 
hate — these can never lead to happiness, all the gods to the 

* Midsummer's Night's Dream. 

t We are neither recommending nor condemning Shakespeare's attitude 
toward the question of another life, but simply endeavoring to Represent it. 

17 



contrary. Nor can all the powers of heaven and hell turn 
self-restraint, moderation, justice, contentment, courage, love 
and peace, into demons of hell. Nature is sound; Nature is 
all-sufficient, and in Shakespeare Nature occupies the stage 
so completely as to leave neither room nor necessity for any 
other power. 

Nothing is so certain and so effective in Shakespeare as 
his criticism of the ways of Providence. When Othello, for 
instance, awakens to a sense of his irreparable loss — when 
the pity of Desdemona's death, like the incoming tide of the 
sea, sweeps over him and takes his breath away, he gasps 
out these significant words with his eyes searching the abysses 
of space over his head : "Methinks there should now be a 
huge eclipse of sun and moon, and the afifrighted earth should 
yawn at altercation." He can not understand how "any 
God" could look down with unmoistened eyes upon such a 
tragedy. What does God do with his powers if he will not 
interfere to save men such as Othello from committing ignor- 
antly so heinous a crime? Again he stammers out, ''Are 
there no stones in heaven but what serve for the thunder?" 
Is God only a spectacular being? Is all he can do to thunder 
in the clouds and dazzle with his lightning? Where is the 
God of help ? Is he real ? Does he exist ? 

To make effective this indifference or helplessness of the 
gods, Shakespeare contrasts their stolid unconcern with human 
sympathy. Emelia, the wife of the man who poisoned Othello's 
mind, breaks into a heart-rending lamentation when she learns 
of the death of her innocent mistress, which shames the silent 
and tearless gods : 

I'll kill myself for grief, 

she sobs as she sees stretched at her feet the victim of 
human folly and crime. How eloquent, and how melting are 
these words ! She does not care to live if she can not protect 
innocence and virtue, beauty and goodness against hate and 
envy. And this from a woman whose character was not above 
reproach ! How admirable is the seething passion in her 

18 



human soul compared with the dumbness of the almighty 
gods ! 

By the mouth of another frail woman Shakespeare passes 
the same criticism upon the current conceptions of divine 
providence. When young Juliet learns that Romeo has killed 
her cousin, for which rash act he has been banished for life, 
thus blighting her dearest hopes, she cries : 

Can Heaven be so envious ? 

Later on, when her own parents persecute her and drive 
her to a desperate experiment with death, and all for the 
purpose of wresting a little happiness out of life, she exclaims : 

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds? 

Finally, when all her hopes are turned to ashes, and she 
realizes the bitterness of her fate, she sobs : 

"Alack, alack that Heaven should practice such stratagems 
upon so soft a subject as myself." 

This is a strong criticism of the popular fancy of a "Father 
in Heaven" who broods over his children as a hen over her 
young. Unlike the preachers of the conventional faiths, Shake- 
speare sought to divest people's minds of dreams and fairy 
stories, that they may learn to cope with reality. This is the 
answer to the charge that the critic takes away people's com- 
fort when he takes away their "religion." On the contrary, 
he helps them to replace the shadow with the substance. Men 
will do more for themselves and their world if they realize 
that if they do not, no other power will. Man becomes a 
god when the place is vacated by the idols. 

But if there is still any uncertainty about Shakespeare's 
religious philosophy, we recommend the careful perusal of the 
scene in Macbeth between Macduff, Malcolm and Rosse. The 
latter has just informed Macduff that the tyrant has put his 
entire household to death : 

Macduff.— My children, too? 

Rosse. — Wife, children, servants, all that could be found. 

Macduff. — My wife killed too? 

19 



Rosse. — I have said. 

Macduff. — All my pretty ones? Did yon say all? * * * 
All? What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam. at one 
fell swoop? 

Then follow these significant words of the bereaved and 
wronged husband : 

Did Heaven look on, 
And would not take their part? 

No wonder the sentiment expressed in the above was con- 
sidered blasphemous by early Christian critics of Shake- 
speare. To a believer in God's right to do as He pleases, 
and in man's duty to bow humbly and uncomplainingly to the 
hand that smites him, the question which Macduff asks is 
both impious and wicked, for he openly upbraids Providence 
for its non-interference, if he does not categorically deny its 
existence. It is not probable that an honest adherent or even 
respecter of the current religious teaching of his day could 
have penned so bold a protest against the popular faith. 
"Where," Shakespeare seems to ask, ''is the Heavenly Father 
whose tender mercies are over all his children?" What does 
God do for man? In what sense would a mother and her 
children, foully murdered, have been worse off, if there had 
been no Providence? And in what way were they benefited 
by the existence of a Heavenly Father? 

In this same play, the poet has once more described his ideal 
man, and there is more of the pagan about him than of the 
Christian. Living in a community which regarded faith as 
the greatest of virtues, without which no amount of moral 
excellence could avail anything, Shakespeare draws a picture 
of his saint which is the very antithesis of Christian ideals. 
Malcolm asks for the respect of his fellows for his character, 
not for his religion. 

Never was forsworn; 
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own ; 
At no time broke my faith ; would not betray 
The devil to his fellow ; and delight 
No less in truth, than life. 

' 20 



The concluding- line— a;i^ delight no less in truth than life— 
we have no hesitation in pronouncing as the most beautiful 
sentiment in Shakespeare. Malcolm says not a word about 
his Christian beliefs, without which ''no one can be saved." 
Once more we call attention to the fact that there are in 
Shakespeare, as there are in Voltaire, nearly all the terms 
of church and creed, but the underlying philosophy of the 
poet is, if we may depend upon the above extracts an^ exam- 
ples, unequivocally rationalistic. Shakespeare was a free- 
thinker, in that he interrogates the popular faith about God, 
and the hereafter, and suggests an order of the universe 
which is the very negation of the supernatural. His indiffer- 
ence to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, then, is not 
due to the fact that he is not a preacher, as Gervinius suggests, 
nor because he preferred "nothing" to Christianity, as Santa- 
yana concludes, or because of his ''tender and delicate reserve 
about holy things," as Charles Knight, one of the most enthu- 
siastic admirers of Shakespeare suggests, but to his utter 
want of intellectual sympathy with the religious thought of 
his day, and to the fact that he had worked out a religion 
of his own, based on the natural virtues— an ethical religion 
of Humanity, with its commandments written, not on parch- 
ments, but in the blood of the race. 

There is undoubtedly a religious atmosphere in Shakespeare, 
but it is the religion of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful ; 
without dogma and without miracle, and as comprehensive, 
as true to nature, and as closely in harmony with the rational- 
istic interpretation of the universe as his own drama. Has 
not Goethe, in defining his own religion, defined also that of 
Shakespeare? "Man is born," writes Goethe, "not to solve 
the problem of the universe, but to find out where the prob- 
lem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of 
the comprehensible/' This is precisely what the great Eng- 
lishman, whom Goethe so sincerely admired, did. He "re- 
strained himself within the limits of the comprehensible," 
which is a beautiful way of saying that he was practical and 
not speculative, scientific in spirit and method, and not the- 

21 



ological. He abstained from the unprofitable pursuit of the 
gods, whom the Bible says in one place, "no man can find 
out by searching," and devoted himself to the study of man 
and his world. This is the religion of sense. There is every- 
thing in Shakespeare about man, and every bit of it is serious ; 
but there is nothing of any consequence in Shakespeare about 
God or gods. It is a matter of regret to the theologian that 
the great poet should have permitted the secular interests of 
life to engage his exclusive thought, but we rejoice in the 
fact that Shakespeare could not be tempted into the dusty 
and winding paths of theology which lead nowhere. 

As truthfully as the great Voltaire, the glorious Shake- 
speare, poet, philosopher, historian, could say of the founders 
of isms, and the inventor and maker of gods, "they have 
troubled the earth, and I have consoled it." 



22 



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